Cause and Effect

Notes

This time loop was caused by an apparently natural phenomena located within the Typhon Expanse. In 2278 the USS Bozeman entered the expanse and encountered the anomaly; the ship was catapulted through time to the year 2368. At this time the Enterprise-D had just located the anomaly and was investigating; the Bozeman emerged her time trip on a collision course with the Enterprise, and despite the efforts of both ships the Bozeman struck the Enterprise's Starboard nacelle.

At the time the Enterprise was suffering a large scale power loss, and had no shields or structural integrity fields in place. The impact thus caused massive systems damage, resulting in a warp core breech. The energy release interacted with the anomaly, causing a 'temporal reset' which threw both ships back in space-time to their relative positions of about twenty four hours earlier. The whole situation then recycled itself over and over in a classic time loop, each time resetting with the destruction of the Enterprise-D.

As with all time loops, however, the reset was not perfect but rather involved small variations on the original situation. These variations were cumulative, and so gradually built up to the point where they fell within the range of conscious perception. The crew of the Enterprise-D experienced this distortion as an increasingly strong sense of Deja-Vu, which eventually became strong enough to cause them to investigate the situation. In addition, events of some preceding cycles intruded on the current cycle to a small degree - manifesting themselves as sounds of various kinds. The crew of the Enterprise was able to bring these clues together and use the information to avoid the impact with the Bozeman, breaking the loop after seventeen cycles.

The ultimate impact of the anomaly was to bring the Bozeman forward in time; Captain Bateson requested permission to return to his own time via a stellar slingshot, and his crew offered to undergo memory erasure in order to avoid Temporal Prime Directive concerns. However, detailed scanning indicated that the disappearance of the Bozeman was a part of the preferred timeline and so this request was denied. Captain Bateson and many of his crew continued to serve in Starfleet after undergoing re-training. The anomaly dissipated when the loop was broken; a class one probe remains in place at the location and has since detected no signs of a return.1